The Great Outdoors (or don’t come in until the streetlights come on)

Living in California, we always seemed to have good weather. As such; my brothers and I were always outside playing. Being sports minded we would play over the line, touch football, ride our 60’s version of skateboards, ride bikes, chase each other, or just kick balls around (at the time we hadn’t heard of soccer). Sometimes we would take a couple of dads golf clubs and play golf in the backyard, or grab our mitts to play pickle.

Now playing golf was lots of fun for awhile, until the day that mom discovered how we dug our holes for the golf balls. I preferred digging with the putter, while Doug was partial to the wedge. We had learned that the end fo the clubs when swung just right made perfect picks.

We also managed to build an underground fort with some of the other kids on the street. Pearce Ave, our street was a dead end on both sides and on the east side we felt the field was a perfect place to play. So my brothers and I with our friends managed to dig a deep hole that we covered with cardboard to build the fort. The entrance was a small hole that we could crawl through. To disguise the cardboard we covered it with some of the dirt we had dug out. This worked great until the day the someone came along and stepped on the roof. Thankfully the fort wasn’t too deep so no injuries.

Looking at the skateboards of today I have to admit some jealousy. Back in the sixties, our skateboards had wooden wheels unlike the polyurethane wheels of today. What this meant is that every little pebble, twig, or lump of paper made a perfect brake for the wheels. I can’t tell you the number of times my brothers and I would be flying down the sidewalk on our skateboards when we would hit an obstruction bringing the skateboard to an immediate stop, while we continued forward in a rather ungraceful motion, usually resulting in skinned knees. Our mom went through lots of Bactine back then.

While we had lots of fun outside, I have to admit that the main reason we were out there was that every single day, whether after school, or after breakfast in the summer, our mom told us the same thing ever day.

“Get out of the house and don’t come in until the streetlights come on!”

Needless to say she loved summer and hated winter.